Re: Removing wm/pager interaction

[John Harper <john dcs warwick ac uk>]

Michael Rogers writes:
|> (1) the widget set used by the pager should match that used by the
|> thing swallowing it
|
|It makes just as much sense for the tasklist buttons to match the window 
|decorations as it does for the tasklist buttons to match the other applets.

I totally disagree -- the pager/tasklist should match the look of the
`panel'. It's not a window border!

(of course ideally, window borders and widgets would look the same
anyway..)

|
|> (2) if the user changes window managers, it shouldn't affect the
|> behaviour of the pager (since from their viewpoint, the pager is part
|> of the desktop environment, not of the window manager)
|
|I don't think that's necessarily true. My point of view is that the pager 
|manages windows, so it is part of the window manager. The basic jobs it does 
|(moving, selecting, resizing and closing windows) are all jobs done by the 
|window manager and not by any other part of the desktop environment.

You're looking at this from the point of view of a window manager
hacker. To somehow who knows nothing about the underlying mechanisms, I
think the pager would appear as part of the desktop. But I guess this
is subjective.

|
|It can adapt itself to size/orientation by listening for ConfigureNotify 
|events on the swallowed window. I guess "other user preferences" means the DE 
|widget set's look and feel. If the pager matches either the WM's theme and 
|widget set or the DE's theme and widget set, I think that will be good enough.

Yes, I realized this. But I wanted another example :-)

(by orientation I meant that the pager might want to display itself
differently in a vertical panel to in a horizontal panel; I'm not sure
if that's necessarily true or not, but it can't tell just from the size
of the window)

	John